CHOICE BLOG

CHOICE Connects: Meet our partners #2

This week, CHOICE is hosting its annual connectorweek! Several of our partners are visiting us during this week to connect with each other, discuss strategy and strengthen eachothers capacity. Every day during the connectorweek we’ll introduce you to a couple of our visiting partners. Today, we’re introducing you to TaYA and Coalizão.

TaYA

“Sexual and reproductive health is often seen as taboo, which can be harmful for the upcoming generation” – TaYA

Talent Youth Association (TaYA) is the largest youth-led grassroots development organization in Ethiopia promoting youth participation and leadership on the issues of youth participation, prevention of HIV/AIDS and the empowerment of young people in sexual and reproductive health and rights.

TaYA is aware of the critical role that adapting to local contexts play in achieving the goals they have. Thus, TaYA engages with those that have power within these contexts such as religious leaders. By training them in Meaningful Youth Participation (MYP), TaYA hopes to convince them of the power of young people. Furthermore, they hope to challenge the stigma and restrictive norms in local communities. An example for those restrictive norms that are challenged by TaYA are the gendernorms in Ethiopia: they believe that women need to be able to claim there rights and position in society.

Coalizão

“Communities need to be involved in order to fight HIV and aids” – COALIZÃO

COALIZÃO is a non-profit organization from Mozambique. They aim for adolescents to become protagonists and have access to the full exercise of their sexual and reproductive rights. They work on ending child marriage and teen pregnancy.

COALIZÃO believes in improving sexual health and rights for young people as a grassroots movement: by having health fairs at local community centers and schools they directly speak to the people they want to get involved with. To mobilize the communities they want to reach, they’ll organize dialogue sessions in which they explain how everyone in the community benefits from improving young peoples sexual health.

But creating such a movements requires a lot of hands on deck: COALIZÃO has trained around 700 volunteers that work across Mozambique. Many of them now have high-level positions in Mozambique after volunteering.